rwolf

I had trouble following the train of thought in this article; it may be too "stream of consciousness" for this particular audience. While this may be a problem between my keyboard and chair, I do not generally find HN articles hard to follow.

There's one piece missing from the show and tell portion: Can you add what the request looks like in your logs when a user clicks on that link? Bonus points if you provide an example of a click from the non-signed in http version.

How much does this change impact you? How many visits are from google searches? How many users are still coming from http google?

Today I learned about If-Match. 428 Precondition Required looks great!

You happen to like when ads are targeted at you.

Do you think everyone likes these ads, and the ones who are complaining are just whining without really thinking about what great pants they could be buying?

Do you think some other people may not like these ads? Is it odd that those people would try to pressure companies into not showing these ads?

Do you think one side of the other is in the majority here? Can either side speak "for" the masses, who don't talk about/understand ads one way or the other?

I refer you to the Beacon advertising adventure. Where Facebook was "just using the data we make available on their network," and users fought back and won.

You last sentence starts with "If there's no injury," which seems to be the topic of discussion here.

When I visit any page with a Like button I'm on their network? When they fill in a dummy profile for me before I sign up I'm on their network?

It's not clear to me that ad-supported == targeted ad-supported. The claim that there is no alternative is false--the alternative is less effective (and therefore less lucrative) ads.

If you ask a HN-reader to choose either 1) less intrusive data collection or 2) more profits to the website, I think it's clear why the user prefers door #1.

Woah woah woah, you seem to be confusing "small experiments Google hosts publicly at labs.google.com" with R&D. Since your wiki link seems to be about publishing academic articles, here's a list of academic article produced by places that are not Bell Labs: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx

The software industry is also producing patents at an absurb rate, which is another byproduct of research (theoretically).

Specifically, stacking means that that blackberry's dip makes symbian's drop look far too drastic. Windows ~10% (eyeballing it) to ~0% seems significant and relevant to the article, but it gets washed out in the graph.

Orkut appears to decline steadily on that graph since 2007. Any variable which goes up over time would look like it was stealing mindshare from orkut.

Negative correlation is also not causation.

You dawg I heard you like relying on the cloud for backup, so I backed up your cloud data on the cloud so you can rely on the cloud while you rely on the cloud.

The android market is blocked in China? Do you have a link--that sounds interesting.

It looks like you can now login without facebook. Good on them--I will give this a try.

    This takes less CPU power but is also far less accurate,
    as the voice sample must be very low quality to have a
    quick response time from Google's server.

Has there been a comparison of the accuracy of the two services? This claim seems unsupported.

The rest of that Zakaria quote (taken from http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/27/jerry-guo-newsweek-groupe...):

    ...In retrospect, it was a mistake—my mistake—and I
    regret it. We should not have been in the business of
    covering luxury goods—that world is so different from
    the traditional world of news reporting. I was always
    uncomfortable with it but was trying to help to help[sic]
    the magazine survive through tough economic times.

    I don’t want to stoop to their level and give a point-by-
    point refutation, but will just let my reporting speak
    for itself and the love our Grouper members have shown us.

I found that this sentence did not match the general tone of the article. It seems out of place in an apology to insist that, while you are a dishonest entrepreneur, you are an honest journalist. I'm sure the statement is true, it just seems like an odd topic to bring up in a relatively short, otherwise focused post.

I wish atroundtable used fragment identifiers so you could deeplink to comments. Or give each comment it's own standalone page as well, a la twitter.

I enjoyed the logo wiggling. Two nits:

* It's only wiggly if your mouse if over that element.

* This groovy dropdown follows you down the page and covers 20% of the text or so at any given time. I appreciate it if it collapsed or moved to the margin.

"Here’s three things that really pissed me off that rolled through my feed."

Some guy on the internet gets offended at out-of-context blurbs he read on the internet about an event he did not attend? Stop the presses.

I already pointed out that HN leaves a cookie behind in another comment, so here's a different tack: is there a site on the first page of http://www.alexa.com/topsites that actually leaves no cookies behind when you logout?

A major faux pas like leaving your uid in the clear in the cookie after logout certainly seems to bother us, but I don't think users (even savvy users) care about leaving some cookies behind. For the record, I've installed various opt-out browser extensions in the past (only to switch computers/browsers and forget to bring them along)--I don't think my views are pro-cookie or even moderate.

Not how cookies work. Visit any page with loads the facebook like widget iframe/img/script -> make a request to facebook with your cookie.

Hell, HackerNews leaves a cookie on your computer after you log out with some opaque blob holding who-knows-what. Users like to complain about cookies when you bring them up, but generally can't seem to bother. Including the two of us.

I'd be interested to see how many competing social networks exhibit the same behavior. Specifically, Twitter and Google+ has similar social buttons.

Imagine I wanted to do this but not be get caught. What would you improve? Clearly the cookies will need to look different pre and post logout, but how different?

You may have meant to talk about humans in general, but the context here is Microsoft. Your claim that Microsoft has very rarely acted against the interests of users on purpose is in need of supporting evidence, as the general sentiment on this social news site is that this is not the case.

To your question: Steve Mann has some interesting thoughts about how being a part of bureaucracy makes it easy to do evil. This is not a new idea: any discussion of collaboration in WW2 Europe will bring up similar themes. Do you think humans who are acting at the behest of an impersonal corporation are intrinsically good in that context?

Citation needed.

I see talk of controls for hiding and sharing items on the timeline, and for turning the timeline on and off, but not for only making it available to your friends.

The barrier to entry to browse a user's past appears to be: a Facebook account.

The nitty-gritty details of corporate politics at Microsoft is of interest to me.

Given the recent barrage of positive tech articles about the upcoming Windows 8, I enjoyed a look from the inside at what looked from outside like a remarkably successful product (at least on the marketing side).

Whose database? Are you a service for syncing photos between third-party photos services (in which case it's thier acls that matter), or another attempt to become a centralized photo service (in which case why talk about openness?).

Nice API != decentralized.

It's in a similar vein to the recent Skype integration.

What are the access controls? Trivially guessable urls make the usual "security through... hey look a pony!" more unsuitable than usual.